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Thursday, February 16, 2017

LEARNING SPECIAL..... If You Want To Be An Effective Learner, You Need To Develop These 4 Skills

If You Want To Be An Effective Learner,
You Need To Develop These 4 Skills

Say your thirtieth birthday is approaching,
and as a sign of this new level of maturity, you’ve decided to add a bit of
value and refinement into your life. You’ve toyed with several ideas, including
becoming a wine connoisseur, a poet laureate, a yoga instructor, a ukulele
player, or a juggler. You finally settle on learning a new language, Korean.
You are inspired and sprint at maximum effort for three or four weeks. Then
your energy and enthusiasm dwindle, and by week five you’ve learned enough
Korean to order badly at a restaurant and offend the regulars. So, you decide
to take up the ukulele. A month later you’ve learned to play a poor rendition
of Happy Birthday. Bored and disenchanted, you quit again.

So, the question becomes, how do you become
an effective learner and expand your horizons?

1. Assess the value of what you are considering learning

Assessment is a very important first step.
Learning something new requires the expenditure of time, attention, effort, and
energy, and in most cases, money as well. Before you invest in learning
something new, determine if it is something worth your effort. Two questions
you should ask yourself:

1.How will this new knowledge or skill benefit me and what purpose will it
serve? If the skill will not meet a need or serve
a real purpose in your life, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should abandon
learning about it–it should, however, dictate the amount of resources the endeavor
should consume.

2.How badly do I want to learn it? Again, the
answer to this question will help you adequately budget how much time and
energy you should give to the activity, or decide whether it is even worth the
time and energy.

Sometimes, we lie to ourselves about what we
want, or we think we want what others have. The key here is to assess why you
want to acquire that knowledge or skill, then determine if you REALLY want it.

2. Set realistic goals

Establishing realistic learning goals is a
major key to effective learning. When learning something new, 100 percent
mastery is a lofty and oftentimes unrealistic goal. The brain works best under
an optimal amount of stress, but not under copious and burdensome amounts of
stress. The level of stress must be high but manageable. Setting a goal of 80%
mastery of a new skill is the sweet spot. It is challenging yet doable. Success fuels motivation, while failure kills
it. Allowing yourself room to fail, while still setting high learning goals, is
the best way for learning optimization to occur.

3. When your learning plateaus, move on

Once you hit a mental plateau and your
learning has considerably slowed, your brain is ready to tackle something new.
The most effective way to take advantage of the brain’s malleability is by
learning something that is related to what you were previously learning. The
brain naturally organizes and categorizes information, and “chunking” previous
learning with new learning is the most effective way to attain and maintain new
knowledge and skills. For example, if you were taking a public speaking
course, you could then transition to taking acting lessons. When information is
studied so that it can be interpreted in relation to other things you already
have in your memory, learning becomes so much more powerful.

4. Multitasking is the enemy

Multitasking, in its true sense, is a
mythical beast. It simply doesn’t exist. Research shows that it is impossible
for the brain to simultaneously work on multiple tasks at once. Instead, the mind constantly switches
between the tasks and their contexts, spinning only one plate at a time.
Multitasking is a highly inefficient way of going about getting things
done. In fact, the brain’s inability to focus on two processes in tandem is
precisely why texting and driving are forbidden. Effective and efficient
learning occurs quickest when there is 100% focus.